Tag: movies

According to the WGA’s 2016 Hollywood Writers Report, just two Native American writers were employed in film in 2014 (the latest year for which data is available), compared with 1,494 white writers. Native Americans accounted for 1.2 percent of the U.S. population in 2014 but in film represented just 0.1{a538f03b5e5ee5fdc03407ba0ca231ac78bf6d75a4715bce2458722af48b01e9} of writers, making them the demographic group with the most disproportionate underrepresentation by a factor of 12 to 1.

So, if we do start making movies in another year or three, I wonder if Castalia Studios will be celebrated as the first Native American-led film studio?

I’m guessing no.

The Man Behind the Curtain seeks a sex change for Indy:

Ready Player One director Steven Spielberg says it’s time for a woman to play Indiana Jones. The director says he knows putting a woman in the lead role of an Indiana Jones movie would upset fans, but believes it’s time the explorer ‘took a different form’.

A woman? Or a girl? No doubt Mr. Spielberg would find it very amusing to make Indy an 10-year-old girl. A promiscuous 10-year-old girl coming on to an older man. Perhaps he could be an older man who just happens to make movies starring lots of children.

After all, it wouldn’t be interesting if she was 16 or 17, right, Stephen?

The Hollywood Values crowd apparently doesn’t want Corey Feldman talking anymore as accusations of child abuse swirl around a major Nickelodeon producer:

Corey Feldman has been hospitalised after being stabbed by a man in what he claims to be a ‘revenge attack’ after his allegations about sexual abuse in Hollywood.

The actor tweeted two pictures of himself in a hospital bed and revealed the attack happened while his security guards were distracted.

Three men approached him while he was out in public, before another man pulled up in his vehicle.

Now, Feldman is shady enough that one can be excused for being a little suspicious about the nature of the attack. I certainly would not put it past him to stage something like this for attention. But if it was a legitimate attack, then it is a clear message being sent to all the young actors and actresses who were abused by people in Hollywood.

Which is why they are better off talking immediately, openly, and loudly to every media outlet that will listen. Otherwise, they will be quietly silenced, one way or another, as has been happening for decades.

UPDATE: Apparently not.

Desperate for more funds, this former child/teen actor who was mostly in movies is resorting to cheap publicity stunts to try and raise more money from what he hopes is a gullible public. Those vacations aren’t going to pay for themselves. 

I think it’s safe to assume the reference is to the unfortunate Mr. Feldman.

Tonight at 8 PM EST we will have an open Brainstorm session to discuss the current status of Arkhaven and Dark Legion, as well as the hypothetical possibility of creating a community-owned movie studio. I realize the latter sounds entirely crazy, but I don’t think it’s necessarily quite as insane as it sounds. It might not be possible yet, but a number of the necessary pieces are at least prospectively in place. And while it’s not even a secondary or tertiary goal of mine, the utility of having a viable visual outlet for the stories we are creating in other formats does not escape me.

There are 500 seats available, and it is first come, first seated.

I have a request in for a feature that would permit reserved seating, but obviously they have not yet had time to implement it. I’m sorry about the double emailing to Brainstorm members, but DST hasn’t changed here yet so I initially got the time there wrong.

I tend to doubt anyone at all was surprised by the fact that Hollywood diversitied, de-Christianized, and generally despoiled Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time. But as a longtime fan of the book – and an especial fan of A Swiftly Tilting Planet – I nevertheless find myself feeling a bit angry at the intentional destruction of a long-cherished tale.

Madeleine L’Engle’s classic young adult novel “A Wrinkle in Time” is the latest victim of diversity-deranged stunt casting in which no respect is paid to the race or sex of existing literary characters. But that’s only one reason why this frustrating fiasco is such an embarrassing failure. Director Ava DuVernay (“Selma”), who has no feel at all for the material, seems more interested in promoting colorblind multi-culturalism than producing an entertaining adaptation that is worthy of its much-beloved source.

Although movies featuring original characters whose physical attributes have been unspecified elsewhere are legitimate equal-opportunity roles for any actors, deviating from already established characters turns a project into either a sort of alternative-reality racelifted remake (the black-cast versions of “Annie” and “Steel Magnolias”), a re-imagined novelty (“The Wiz”), comic exploitation (“Blacula”) or a display of randomly colorblind inclusiveness (a black Human Torch in the most recent “Fantastic Four”). All of those swaps are distracting enough to seem like gimmicks, even if an appearance-miscast actor gives an otherwise adequate performance.

Teenage Meg Murry and her mother, both white like the rest of their family in the 1962 “A Wrinkle in Time” novel, are portrayed in this film version by black actresses Storm Reid and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Dad is played by Caucasian Chris Pine. Because Meg’s precocious younger brother Charles Wallace is played by Filipino-American Deric McCabe, this results in the absurdity of the character now being identified as adopted, presumably because it would be hard to believe he could be the product of Mbatha-Raw and Pine’s union. Twin brothers from the book are missing entirely from the movie, which may be a blessing, considering that political correctness probably would have dictated they be played by a Native American dwarf and a disabled transsexual.

The irony of making changes like these to a book in which Meg herself states that “like and equal are not the same thing at all” apparently was lost on those responsible. (Then again, the line does not appear in the movie, possibly because the filmmakers knew they had sabotaged said theme.) Also, it’s unfortunate that the film eliminates the novel’s references to Christianity that resulted in it being banned from some libraries. Inclusion apparently has its limits.

I still have not forgotten how Hollywood sucked all the story and the soul out of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and turned it into a pointless nothing of a movie. Seeing the soulless vampires do the same thing to Madeleine L’Engle only confirms my decision to stay very far away from the entertainment Ecthroi.

When the time comes, we will make our own movies and we will tell our own stories. We will not sell them to the soul-destroyers to be transformed into mocking parodies of what they were created to be. If you are an author, do not sell or option your rights to these creatures. It is not worth it.

Appendix N author Jeffro Johnson takes David Brooks to task for a shockingly ignorant statement about the cultural power of conservatives:

Writing in the pages of The New York Times, conservative commentator David Brooks closes out a column with this striking kicker:

Conservatives have zero cultural power, but they have immense political power. Even today, voters trust Republicans on the gun issue more than Democrats. If you exile 40 percent of the country from respectable society they will mount a political backlash that will make Donald Trump look like Adlai Stevenson.

It’s audacious, really. I mean sure, non-leftists have been steadily filtered out of education, academia, journalism, publishing, Hollywood, and the arts for so long that most people can’t even imagine it being any different. But zero? Really?

It takes a special sort of ignorance to embrace such a position. Even the residual power of Tarzan, Cthulhu, Middle Earth, and Conan remains a potent force, even in a marketplace flooded with both bastardized derivatives and hostile critiques. Smarmy elites dismissed the staunchly Catholic Tolkien in his lifetime and declared heroic fantasy bad for us from every platform they could manage to subdue. And yet he outlasted all of his detractors to become Author of the Century. And right at this very moment, Jordan Peterson’s number one international bestselling book is a sensation precisely because it is making the timeless wisdom that infuses the Bible accessible to a generation that is starving for answers and common sense.

The reason the ideological Right has limited cultural power these days is because the Left, with (((David Brooks))) and his nation in the vanguard, have worked very hard for at least four generations at attempting to eradicate everything from the culture that betrays any sign of Christian influence or Western tradition.

And the reason that they are failing despite their near-complete control of the cultural high ground is because they have literally nothing to offer in its place. All they ever had to offer was reaction, negation, ugliness, filth, and snark. Sure, you can adulterate Christmas, and you can substitute Silver Bells, shopping, Santa, and Seasons Greetings for Silent Night, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Scrooge, and We Wish You a Merry Christmas, but at the end of the day, either you come up with a substitute or your efforts will eventually prove futile.

What did they come up with in over a century of frantic effort? Festivus, the Hannukah Aardvark, and horrible movies that are bad even by Seth Rogen’s standards. Hardly an attractive exchange for even the most godless pagan.

We not only can win this cultural war, we cannot lose it so long as we continue to create things that are good, beautiful, and true, and continue to refuse entrance to the infiltrating wormtongues who are always there with their helpful blandishments and seductive offers to sell your creative soul to Mammon.

So let them turn Elsa of the Crowleyesque anthem into a lesbian. Let them transform Superman into an SJW superhero fighting for global migration, one-world government, and AIPAC. Let them continue to preen and posture and sneer and snark in futility. It will avail them nothing. Like their Father the Devil, they cannot create, they can only corrupt. And that is why the greatness of Tolkien, of Howard, of Lovecraft, and of Wright will continue to be recognized over time despite the Left’s best efforts to denigrate and diminish it.

Here are three more shots in the cultural war for the West. Another will be fired tomorrow.

UPDATE: Jeffro responds to a defeatist gamma who took exception to his post, then showed up here to lie about him.

It’s rather bizarre to see all the “hurrah for African nationalism” hooplah about Black Panther when it is clearly just more globalist propaganda dressed in a dashiki. WATYF went to see the movie so you don’t have to; he responded to the following exchange between MOTW and me in which we theorized precisely how it would be converged. And, as it turns out, it is a severely converged movie that subverts, rather than celebrates, the very nationalism it so ostentatiously displays.

MOTW: I even predict that the second Black Panther movie will have a villain who wants to bring the traditional nationalist values back to Wakanda, but the Black Panther–who will by then be SJW enlightened and will thus have accepted the glories of progressive globalism–will fight to stop Wakanda’s return to its past “dark ages” of nativism and “regressivism”. Thus, in this movie, they show a nationalistic Wakanda so that they can then use that premise in movie two to show how much better Wakanda becomes once it turns globalist and progressive. That is my prediction.

VOX: I was actually expecting them to pull that in this movie.

WATYF: They did.

How many people here actually saw this movie? I thought I saw some comments about how this movie was pro-nationalist and so would undercut the SJWs and what not. Was this something they concluded from second-hand info? Because that’s the opposite message that this movie conveys.

I’ll leave aside the non-political things I didn’t like about this movie (the CGI, the incoherent motives of the Big Bad, the lousy fight choreography, the hammy accents/acting) and focus on the political message.

The Big Bad is angry at the history of black oppression (and maybe even oppression in general, but mostly black oppression) and he’s also pissed that Black Panther’s dad killed his dad. He tricks some white dude into helping him steal back an artifact that was stolen from Wakandans by evil Whitey a long time ago. Afterwards, he double-crosses the white dude because it ends up he only wanted to kill him so he could deliver him (a wanted Wakandan criminal) to the Wakandans as a way to leverage his way in the door and gain some clout.

Once there, he points out how Wakandans shouldn’t be in hiding, letting oppression of their people (I guess all black people are their people or something) go on around the world. They should be helping. Not just helping, but ruling. Black Panther talks about how important it is that they protect Wakanda and its secrets and how it has always been this way. Big Bad challenges Black Panther for the crown and wins, then sets in motion a plan to send advanced weapons to all of the “oppressed people” around the world so they can rise up against their oppressors.

Yes, some of the social justicey things are put in the mouth of the Big Bad, but they are done so in a sympathetic manner, not in a way that makes him sound crazy or even wrong. This is demonstrated by the fact that by the end of the movie, after defeating the Big Bad and giving him a chance to see one last Wakandan sunset and say a few words about the evils of slavery before finally dying, Black Panther decides that the Big Bad was right all along (at least in part).

First, he goes to America and buys up a bunch of buildings in the projects so he can “make a difference”. Then, in a post-credit scene that made me groan audibly, he goes to the UN, announces their intention to start aiding the world and taking a more active role in it, reveals their secret advanced status (since up to that point everyone assumed they were just a poor nation of farmers) and gives a “Can’t we all just get along” speech that rivals anything ever said by any milquetoast, white-guilt-addled liberal. Something about “there’s much more that unites us than divides us” and all that hippy-dippy garbage.

There is nothing “nationalist” about this movie. If anything, it’s about how a nationalist learned that his nationalism was wrong.

I will say that the preachy context in the main part of the film was more subtle and that if you didn’t hang around for the post-credit scene then you may have missed exactly what they were trying to say, but after the speech he gives at the UN, the message couldn’t have been clearer.

Metaphorical translation: Wakanda is Israel. The primary theme is the selfish evil of nationalism versus the imperialist imperative of tikkun olam and blessing the world through magnanimous superiority. The memes are wrong. This movie is not even remotely Alt-Right. It is as every bit as cancerous and converged as we expected.

And why on Earth would you ever have expected anything else from Disney? SJWs ALWAYS double down.

Black Panther is not only the best superhero movie ever made, it is also the most successful. More or less. This just goes to show that Obama really did heal the racial divide in the United States and end global racism.

By the time the four-day President’s Day holiday stretch ends, Black Panther will have surpassed many of Marvel’s mightiest on the all-time domestic B.O. openers chart. Black Panther is now looking at the 6th best opening of all-time on a 3-day-basis with an estimated $187.6M per industry projections and a mind-blowing $216M over four days.

How much do moviegoers love Black Panther? The Ryan Coogler-directed movie earned an A+ CinemaScore tonight, Marvel’s second after 2012’s The Avengers.

On the 3-day all-time chart, Black Panther is just above Captain America: Civil War ($179.1M). Back in January Fandango reported that out of the gate in its first 24 hours, Black Panther outstripped the advance tickets sales of Civil War, however, analysts didn’t rush to comp the Wakanda superhero to Marvel’s other titles. They just couldn’t believe at the time how massive this was going to be. While Black Panther is under Avengers: Age of Ultron on the 3-day all-time openers list  ($191.2M), the pic is beating the sequel’s four-day run ($204.4M). Black Panther has already left Disney’s Beauty and the Beast ($174.7M) and WB/DC’s Batman v. Superman ($166M) in the dust to become the biggest pre-summer opener of all-time.

This is excellent news. Given the similarly unprecedented success of Wonder Woman, Marvel is clearly going to be doubling down, and doubling down again, on even more diversity.

The door to the disruption of the comics industry just opened that much wider.

It’s going to be amusing to read the revisionist reviews when all the critics finally sober up. I expect we will see an arc similar to the one we see after every Star Wars movie.

1. OMG! It’s the BEST since EMPIRE!
2. Okay, maybe we got a little carried away. But it’s still really good!
3. Well, I mean, it’s all right.
4. Actually, there are a lot of things that don’t make any sense.
5. And are pretty lame, come to think of it.
6. This movie sucks.
7. Now, what was the second one called? No, the second of the new ones, not the prequels.

You know it’s going to happen. The whispers about the first major plot holes have already begun. And speaking of Star Wars movies, as of Day 62, The Last Jedi had officially fallen $300 million behind its predecessor in domestic box office.

TFA: Day 63 $917.8
TLJ: Day 63 $617.4

Both my December 19th prediction and my January 12th projection of $624 million domestic are looking pretty good. Including the foreign box office, TLJ is currently $745.8 million short. Convergence is expensive.

Arkhaven movies. Why? Because now that it has seen its comic sales decline on the strength of its commitment to diversity, Marvel is doubling down and is going to make a stronger commitment to diversity in its movies:

Feige acknowledged that not having to think about diversity and representation is something that easy to take for granted that all cinematic heroes look like him ie: a white male.

“It’s something that’s easy to take for granted, growing up in the United States as a white male, that my cinematic heroes look like me,” said Feige. “I never thought they looked exactly like me, because I’m not a big athletic hero, but they do. It’s something that over the course of these ten years, having a certain amount of power over what type of movies are made and what type of actors we hire, I want everybody to have that feeling. We don’t take it for granted that people want to see themselves reflected in our heroes and our characters. That’s been the case in the comics for years, and, finally, that’s the case in the movies, and will only continue from here.”

Feige just did something that a lot of people are incapable of doing; he acknowledge how easy it is to forget about diversity and representation when they don’t effect you. He “checked his privilege” to use a term that’s been overused and misunderstood. It’s the same with racism or homophobia or any other form of prejudice; just because it doesn’t personally effect you doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. The fact that Feige can acknowledge that sometimes he forgets is important because that is the first step to being truly aware.

I look forward to my first conversation several years from now with a well-established cinematic figure who is duly horrified by my near-complete lack of interest in, or knowledge of, film history, techniques, directors, producers, screenwriters, traditions, and culture.

Q: “How can you possibly expect to be successful when you don’t know or care about the industry?”

A: One word: “diversity”.

And by soon, I mean five years instead of never.

It’s understandably hard for ordinary Americans to take seriously the overwrought claims of Hollywood actors and actresses that shady people are trying to kill them or destroy them. Then you read things like this story about Uma Thurman’s treatment at the hands of Harvey Weinstein and his team, and you realize that it is simply an alien world every bit as foreign as a civil war in Malawi or ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

Since the revelations about Weinstein became public last fall, Thurman has been reliving her encounters with him — and a gruesome episode on location for “Kill Bill” in Mexico made her feel as blindsided as the bride and as determined to get her due, no matter how long it took.

With four days left, after nine months of shooting the sadistic saga, Thurman was asked to do something that made her draw the line.

In the famous scene where she’s driving the blue convertible to kill Bill — the same one she put on Instagram on Thanksgiving — she was asked to do the driving herself.

But she had been led to believe by a teamster, she says, that the car, which had been reconfigured from a stick shift to an automatic, might not be working that well.

She says she insisted that she didn’t feel comfortable operating the car and would prefer a stunt person to do it. Producers say they do not recall her objecting.

“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’ But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)

Thurman then shows me the footage that she says has taken her 15 years to get. “Solving my own Nancy Drew mystery,” she says.

It’s from the point of view of a camera mounted to the back of the Karmann Ghia. It’s frightening to watch Thurman wrestle with the car, as it drifts off the road and smashes into a palm tree, her contorted torso heaving helplessly until crew members appear in the frame to pull her out of the wreckage. Tarantino leans in and Thurman flashes a relieved smile when she realizes that she can briefly stand.

If a car can’t go 40 MPH on a straight stretch of road, you don’t need a stunt driver, you need a crash team investigation and a prosecutor. I doubt Tarantino tried to kill Thurman, but either she is the worst driver in the world or someone did.

Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue. Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.